Newbie’s guide to Facebook
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9753415-2.html?tag=nl.e404

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I was wrong. I think you should dive in and get to know it.

So. This is how you do it.

1) Log onto Facebook.
2) Add a handful of people as friends, for now by looking at the friends-of your friends.
3) Change your Status Update. The status update is at the core of Facebook; it’s the quintessential case of how you change something on your account and everyone else sees it on their News Feed.
4) Log on again in a few hours, or the next day. (Really, to *get* Facebook, you want to log on at least once a day.) *Change your status*, and read through your News Feed to see what everyone else has been doing. If the mood strikes you, then comment on someone’s Wall about their status change. Or on the photos they’ve uploaded or changed their profile pic to.
5) Repeat 4.

Beemer: Great comments. I don’t think we’re stuck with the technologies we originally learned. But your comment that “The costs of learning a new technology are significant, but you’ll pay them if you get a benefit from it.” is key. When I was younger, I had no tools in place so my barrier to adoption was basically zero because anything was better than nothing. Now that I have technologies in place to run my life, I have to see significant benefits to the new technology before I am willing to invest in learning it. If I see those benefits, I’ll take the time to learn it, as I did with LiveJournal, RSS, blogs, DVRs, etc.

Another example: I tried getting a wiki used for documentation at my old company and completely failed, but we’re using wikis extensively at my current job. Unsurprisingly, my current job involves working with young technologists, so getting them to adopt wikis was easier than it was for my old coworkers who were comfortable with Word and Excel. However, if the benefits of a wiki had been clearly demonstrated to my old coworkers, it might have been different.

The costs of learning a new technology are significant, but you’ll pay them if you get a benefit from it. Witness: digital vs analog in audio and video devices.

I’m not disagreeing with what you’ve said here, by the way; I think it’s insightful. But there’s a floating concept that we’re stuck with whatever tech was popular when we were at some critical age, and that email vs IM is an old-fogey-vs-new-hotness issue, which I think is wrong and want to point out for correction.

Consider: we used both email and IM when we were undergrads. Now my primary mode of mediated interaction is via personal website discussion forums. Not so different from MySpace or FaceBook. I think the big difference is that those sites are relatively impenetrable because they’re very much about constructing a public identity and a social network. People our age have already done that, so we see all the elements like embedded song players as noise, rather than as important features. It’s not a matter of age in the sense of your historical era of birth that matters, but in the sense of what stage of your life you’re in.